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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

Healthcare, school lunches, diversion programs, research grants

(conts) infrastructure upkeep, managing various natural resources, emergency management, weather reporting/forecasting/research, economic reporting/research...

There are so many valuable services provided by the US federal government. People just take it all for granted.

I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things. I would be much happier to pay taxes if they went to funding schools, infrastructure, NASA, emergency management, poverty relief and other useful things instead of putting undocumented immigrants who could be productive members of society in concentration camps or bombing brown people. Furthermore, I am happy to fund particular defense initiatives like supporting Ukraine, but I want a line item veto on unproductive or morally repugnant things the government does.

> I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things.

Obviously, this was supposed to be the job of the person you elected.

But in 2024 we definitely have the technology to let people vote on smaller units of issues that they care about.

I would be completely in support of people self-allocating their taxes as long as (1) the distribution still had to add up to 100% so you can’t under contribute and (2) government offices capped their income and redistributed excess to the general funds instead of letting some feel-good departments waste money they didn’t need but were allocated.

The caps must be high enough that departments are in competition for funds. Presumably the outcome is then that the department for fluffy bunnies is funded up to its cap, taking money away from the department for unblocking drains.

I’ve gotten to see some of that at a local level and… I just don’t know. We barely managed to pass a local school levy to recoup from a major accounting error that would have meant massive layoffs for the district. It’s a pretty good district academically, and I was shocked at how many empty nesters (new ones, too) were vocal about voting no just because “no new taxes“, despite all of their kids consuming that very system with great benefit for the past 18 years.

A few counties away, the library district said without a tax increase, they’ll have to shut down. “No new taxes” carried the day. Library shut down. Now folks are howling. And again it’s the non-voting kids that suffer.

If this is the behavior of folks about issues affecting their neighbors, in their own town, I’m not too optimistic what sort of support we could see for any kind of longer-term issue, especially if it isn’t atop the media cycle.

The way I (not the previous poster) envision this working is not that you can opt out of taxes, but you can skip certain items.

So I don't pay Israel's defense budget, but that money is reallocated evenly to everything else.

I find it hard to believe a meaningful number of people would opt out of libraries and schools assuming their overall tax burden is unchanged.

if they vote against a tax levy for a school they will most definitely vote to send the money elsewhere.

Empty nesters or childless people will funnel their tax money to things like parks, fire trucks, and other things.

This sounds like a good way to accidentally create an industry of reverse lobbyists where the government contracts them to convince tax payers to allocate money to their department.

I might be too pessimistic though, I tend towards liking the idea but I'm concerned about the changes it could cause.

That already happens. Why else would Northrop advertise a stealth jet at the superbowl.

Hypothecated taxes are an anti-pattern, for precisely this reason. Setting the budget and setting the taxes should be somewhat separated (but not too separated!)

Members of Congress often propose things like this because it sounds good but in practice it's meaningless.

Suppose that Democrats don't want to pay for bombs and Republicans don't want to pay for makework jobs, so they both say they don't want their tax money to be used for this. Then the government takes the money from Democrats they didn't spend on bombs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the makework jobs programs and takes the money Republicans didn't spend on makework jobs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the military, and nothing changes at all.

The only way it could actually do something is if you got the money back you didn't want spent on that thing, instead of letting the government spend it on something else. But then most people would do that with large chunks of government spending because they'd rather the money than the programs.

That always sounds nice until you see how it plays out in universities and other charities. The directed donations don't get sent to where they are most needed; they end up funding large vanity projects.

The US already spends more on healthcare than just about every other country and the inefficiency of that spending is an obvious problem that should probably be addressed before throwing any more money into the fire. But if it was addressed then the amount of spending needed would go down rather than up.

That other stuff doesn't even cost a significant amount of money by comparison and could be well-funded from the savings.

The government doesn't lack for revenue, it lacks for efficiency.

Our healthcare is horribly wasteful and inefficient. But since the US government isn't in charge of it for most people, you can't blame them here. Our ultra-capitalist healthcare "system" achieved this spectacular waste all by itself.

The US does not have an "ultra-capitalist" healthcare system. Its healthcare system is heavily regulated and subsidized and many of those regulations are bought and paid for by the incumbents to prevent competition, i.e. the thing that allows private systems to be efficient. You can't just call something "capitalism" while regulating it into market concentration and expect that to work.

You're making a "no true Scotsman" argument. This is, in fact, how capitalism works whenever you fail to regulate it. Rent-seeking and regulatory capture is a feature, not a bug.

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